Jordan, like other Arab states, has also experienced it's chapter of Islamic revival. But Jordan, like all other Arab states, has a uniqueness of it's own. Jordan has a religiously homogeneous population, just like Egypt. And well over 90% of its people are Sunni Muslim speakers of the Arabic language. There is but a small minority of Arab Christians, mostly Orthodox. Much is usually said, justifiably, about the cleavage between original Jordanians and Jordanians of Palestinian origin. But not enough attention is paid to the fact, the great majority of both Jordanians and Palestinians are Sunni Muslims. A collective cultural and religious identity that has bound them together for centuries. And is more significant than their distinct but relatively new and more shallow modern national identities. Though the monarchy in Jordan and the Islamists were clearly on opposite sides of the ideological barricades, they had not always been so. In fact, the Muslim Brethren and the Jordanian regime had been long-standing political allies in the confrontation with the Nasserists and Ba'thists, secular Arab socialists, throughout the 1950s and the 1960s. The Muslim Brethren also loyalty stood by the regime in 1970 in its war against the PLO whose ranks included Marxist factions that also happened to be led by Christians. There was, therefore, in the Jordanian case, no residue of bad blood between the regime and the Islamists, as there was in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Algeria. Moreover, the Hashemites were not seen by the Islamists as a religiously illegitimate minority like the Alawites in Syria. On the contrary, the monarchy regularly emphasized that it possessed a noble, Islamic ancestry as descendents of the prophet who was himself of the house of Hash. But the Muslim Brethren and their political party, the Islamic Action Front, were no match in any competition with the Jordanian political establishment. The Islamists won 40% of the seats in Jordan's 1989 relatively free parliamentary elections. An amazing feat and a sign of the changing times. The feat of 1989, however, was never repeated. The regime has used all available means, from new legislation to oppression and fraud, to insure that no similar outcome would ever be achieved again. Algeria is yet another example of Islamist electoral success. In December 1991, the first multi-party elections were held in Algeria since its independence in 1962. After the first round of the elections, it was clear that the Islamists were on the road to victory. The military intervened and cancelled the elections leading to the outbreak of a bloody civil war in the country which lasted for some ten years. And claimed between 40 to 100,000 lives before the Islamists were finally subdued. Palestine is yet another similar example. Though the Palestinian case is extraordinary in the Arab world. Extraordinary because the Palestinian Authority is not a fully sovereign entity. It is not a state and doesn't have the means of repression that other Arab states do have. And therefore, it does not possess a strong enough counterweight to the Islamic trend. In the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Assembly in 2006, Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian group, emerged victorious in both the West Bank and Gaza. Fatah, essentially supported by Israel, the U.S. and other Western governments, would not come to terms with Hamas on how to proceed with the implementation of the election results. In June 2007, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip by force. And the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority remained in control of the west bank, ruling by the instrument of a declared state of emergency. The West Bank under the Palestinian Authority and Gaza under Hamas have since developed as two separate political entities and all attempts at reconciliation have failed, thus far. The fact that Islamic movements had risen to preeminence in Algeria and in Palestine. The lands of the FLN, the [FOREIGN], and the PLO, the two prototypical, ostensibly secular, national liberation movements of the 20th century Middle East was another dramatic illustration of the secularist retreat. Generally, since the late 1980s, in fair and free elections, the Islamists either won outright or did very well. This was also the case in Egypt and Tunisia in the Arab Spring. And in Turkey in all election since the mid 1990s, except for one. The formerly prevalent assumption, on the part of the secularizing Middle Eastern regimes, that the process of secularization was one of inevitable progression that would eventually extend to all middle eastern societies has been proven wrong. The notion of secularization championed by these Middle Eastern regimes was drawn from the European experience of state formation and modernization, and based on the idea of secularization expounded upon in the works of the Trinity of Social Theory, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber in which the decline of religious belief was scientifically forecasted. State secularism in the 20th Century Middle East, however, failed to produce secular societies. Though organized religion did decline, new religious movements with mass followings emerged. In one of his earliest works, over four decades ago, Bernard Lewis wrote, that the introduction of the secular heresy of nationalism, of collective self worship, is the best found and least mentioned of the many grievances of the Middle East against the West. After a period in which secular nationalism assumed the dominant political role in Middle Eastern societies, it's ideological offspring, the secularization of politics in society, is now being seriously challenged. While the secular nationalists sought to nationalize Islam and demoted to just one of various components of the national identity. For the Islamists, religion was the cohesive element of society. And while they did not reject nationalism, they sought to Islamize the nation and the state. Thus, the difference was essentially between those who wished to nationalize Islam and those who wanted to Islamize nationalism. The nationalist were usually not so secular as to completely reject religion. Rather, Islamists were usually not so radical as to completely reject nationalism but the two clans definitely had different centers of gravity. Hamas and the PLO are good examples of these differing centers of gravity. The charter of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement in Palestine, accepts nationalism as part and parcel of religious ideology. But it proclaims Palestine to be an Islamic trust or endowment, Wakf. And condemns the PLO for having accepted the idea of a secular state. As secularism is in total contradiction to religious thought, as Hamas would have it. And the Islamic nature of Palestine is part of our religious belief, as the Charter says. Once the PLO accepted Islam as a way of life. Hamas would become its soldiers, so the charter proclaims.
